Chapter Seven

The Reorganised Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Trotskista) and the 1959 Revolution

This chapter addresses the organisational and theoretical development of the Trotskyists in Cuba under the conditions of the post-1959 revolutionary order. First, I outline the formation of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Trotskista) (POR(T)) in early 1960, its geographical and social composition, and its forced dissolution in 1965. I argue that although the POR(T) was only a small group with a narrow base in the working class movement, the circumstantial evidence suggests that the attacks against the Cuban Trotskyists served as a barometer reflecting the ‘Stalinisation’ of the Revolution. That is, I contend that while the repression was initially the result of the old pesepistas’ rise to positions of influence in the institutions of the Revolutionary Government, the POR(T)’s forced dissolution was ultimately sanctioned by the Revolutionary Leadership as it broadly acquiesced to a number of policy options favoured by the Kremlin, most significantly siding with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute.

In the second section in this chapter, I discuss the Cuban Trotskyists’ position with regard to the political and economic questions of the day. I argue that the POR(T) was essentially a continuation of the Partido Bolchevique Leninista (PBL) in the 1930s and the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) in the 1940s and 50s in the sense that it effectively renounced the need for the proletariat through its own self-clarified democratic organisations forged in the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle to lead the socialist transformation of society.

The third section considers the importance which the activity and repression of the Cuban POR(T) was accorded within the various Fourth International tendencies and the extent to which this was significant in confirming the realignment of the forces of international Trotskyism. Here I argue that the Cuban Trotskyists were largely abandoned by major tendencies within international Trotskyism due to the fact amidst a post-World War Two atmosphere of isolation and defeat the mainstream Trotskyist currents with whom the Cubans had contact had also broadly embraced the essence of the Cuban Trotskyists’ ‘Second Period’ and ‘national liberation’ arguments. Failing to propose a politically independent course for the working class, Trotskyists world-wide not only identified the elitist Fidelista leadership and/or a broad anti-imperialist bloc as an agent for socialist revolution, but forgot the rights of communist dissidents as they increasingly sought to swim with the flow in the New Left milieu which was passionately and largely uncritically enthusiastic about the merits of Castro and the Cuban Revolution.

An epilogue outlines the activities of those Cubans who have remained politically active and claimed the mantle of Trotskyism since 1965. The aim of this section is to establish that while there has been a continued native Trotskyist presence in Cuba after the POR(T)’s formal suppression as an open party, the activity of this post-1965 nucleus has continued to insist that Stalinist forces and national liberation movements can not only lead the struggle against the threat of imperialist intervention in Cuba, but also extend the socialist revolution in Latin America and further afield.

The principal published discussion which has reflected on the activity and suppression of the POR(T) during the 1960s was initiated by a speech made by Jack Barnes of the Socialist Workers’ Party in the United States (SWP(US)) on 31 December 1978. He argued that the Cuban Trotskyists’ “speciality” had been their ultra-leftist call for a march on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo to expel imperialist forces.(1)Adolfo Gilly and Angel Fanjul, two Argentine Trotskyists who as members of the Latin American Bureau had spent time in Cuba with the POR(T), took issue with Barnes’ statement, accusing him of distorting the facts and repeating Stalinist slanders to suit the SWP(US)’s immediate political interests.(2)They argued that the POR(T)’s conduct was far from sectarian, and in fact constituted a principled struggle against Stalinism in Cuba for the right of revolutionary tendencies to function legally.(3) In response, José G. Pérez fleshed out the SWP(US)’s initial criticisms of the POR(T)’s activity. While repeating the accusation that the Cuban Trotskyists’ “distinguishing characteristic” was their call for the military take over of the Guantánamo Naval Base, he also argued that the POR(T)’s ultra-leftism resulted in it missing an opportunity to bloc with the Fidelista leadership.(4)

Leaving aside a strict analysis of the POR(T)’s theory and strategy until Section 7.2, I first trace the activity and suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists and address these quite different interpretations. Here I argue that accusations of the POR(T) acting in an ultra-leftist fashion particularly on the issue of the U.S. Naval Base are groundless and, in fact, only serve as a smoke-screen to disguise the ebb and flow of Stalinist influence on the course of the Revolution. That is, the available evidence indicates that the campaign against the Cuban Trotskyists, which began with attacks from the Partido Popular Socialista (PSP) in 1960 and intensified during the subsequent years as the old pesepistas successfully linked the institutions of the Revolutionary Government to their denunciation of Trotskyism, reflected Moscow’s influence on the Revolutionary Government and the Fidelista leadership’s eventual acquiescence to many of the central policy options favoured by pro-Moscow Stalinists.

After the triumph of the Revolution, although no formally constituted Trotskyist organisation existed in Cuba, a core of former PBL and POR members continued to agitate within the petty bourgeois nationalist milieu in an apparent attempt to strengthen the proletarian base in the evolving revolutionary institutions. This perspective of loosely working within a broad revolutionary constituency was exemplified by the intervention of Idalberto Ferrera Acosta in the Movimiento de Superación del Barrio Sur de Guantánamo, a spontaneous community-based organisation and forerunner to the state-sponsored Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). As one of its principal leaders Ferrera was involved in initiating a literacy campaign in Guantánamo, as well as the collection of money for agrarian projects and the organisation of guards for public buildings.(5)

Having lost contact with the Fourth International in the late 1940s and early 1950s, relations with the international Trotskyist movement were re-established in 1959 after the arrival of Olga Scarabino (*Miranda), a Uruguayan representative of the Latin American Bureau of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International headed by *J. Posadas (Homero Cristalli). As described in Section 2.4, the Trotskyist groups adhering to the International Secretariat, in contrast to those affiliated to the International Committee, formally supported the ‘Pabloite’ theses that various Stalinist and national liberation movements were agencies for socialist revolution.(6) Given such a soft line on cross-class forces, it is unsurprising that Scarabino’s initial relations and contact with the militants of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26J) in 1959 were reportedly characterised by their cordiality and fraternal spirit and she was given access to the radio and television. It was during one such broadcast that she made a public call to Cuban Trotskyists for a meeting.(7)However, although her presence speeded up the process of reorganising a Trotskyist party in Cuba, according to various testimonies,(8) it was on the initiative of the Cuban Trotskyists themselves that a Trotskyist party was reconstituted in early 1960.

The Cuban POR(T) was founded on 6 February 1960,(9) and was formally proposed for recognition as the Cuban section of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International at the January 1961 Sixth World Congress,(10) which Scarabino attended as the Cuban POR(T)’s delegate.(11)Counting on only approximately forty members,(12) the POR(T) openly re-established branches in the three urban centres where the former POR had survived into the 1940s, namely, Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo. It rented a public office in Guantánamo, its principal base.(13)

Despite the POR(T)’s small size, though, it did have roots in the history of working class struggle in Cuba. It was principally because of Trotskyism’s past record of struggle that after the founding of the POR(T), the initial activists’ immediate perspective for building the party was to recruit those militants who had been active in the PBL and POR in the 1930s and 40s.(14)José Medina, an old guantanameño Trotskyist, was the POR(T)’s first General Secretary,(15) while Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, also originally from Guantánamo and the POR(T)’s General Secretary from 1961/62, established his apartment at Monte 12 in La Habana Vieja as the party’s public central address. Other former members of the old PBL and POR organisations who participated in the re-founded party’s activities included Elías Suárez, José Medina and Luciano García in Guantánamo, and Roberto Acosta Hechavarría, Roberto Tejera, Armando Machado and Mary Low Machado in Havana. Pablo Díaz, a leading POR member in the 1940s and one of Fidel Castro’s original fourteen-member General Staff on the Granma, also participated in the POR(T)’s meetings and discussion groups in Havana. However, given his links with the Revolutionary Leadership and the growing influence of the PSP in that circle, this was always carried out with a degree of discretion and he did not participate in the POR(T)’s public activities.(16)

Other, younger militants who supplemented the regrouping of the old PBL and POR members included Floridia Fraga, a daughter of Gustavo Fraga, Andrés Alfonso, and Idalberto, Ricardo and Juan León Ferrera Ramírez, the three sons of Idalberto Ferrera Acosta and Guarina Ramírez. The incorporation of these new recruits into the Cuban Trotskyist party also confirmed the working class social composition of the POR(T). The majority of the Guantánamo branch were local trade union leaders and activists known for their commitment to the rights and struggles of workers. In Havana, Ricardo Ferrera after coming down from the sierra worked in the commercial sector, while Floridia Fraga and Andrés Alfonso worked in the transport sector, Alfonso as a mechanic in a bus repair depot.(17)One of the few professionals in the POR(T)’s ranks was Roberto Acosta who, as a leading electrical engineer, helped to organise the nationalised electricity company before going on to work in the Ministry of Industry under Che Guevara as the Director of Weights, Measures and Time Management.(18) While these Latin American envoys in no sense foisted the existence of a Trotskyist party on the Cuban Revolution, their presence was not without importance for the young POR(T). The envoys did not have fixed, paid employment and were effectively able to devote much of their attention to the tasks of the party, preparing theoretical material and helping with the publication of the newspaper. Furthermore, as leading members of Trotskyist parties elsewhere in Latin America they had recent experience of party building as well as knowledge of the theoretical debates within the Fourth International tendencies in the 1950s, something which their Cuban comrades lacked.

The POR(T)’s Cuban cadres were also supplemented at various times by a number of leading Latin American Trotskyists from different sections of the Latin American Bureau of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. Apart from Scarabino, the principal foreign envoys included Alberto Sendic (*A. Ortíz), José Lungarzo (*Juan), Adolfo Gilly (*H. Lucero), and Angel Fanjul (*Heredia).(19)J. Posadas himself, the Secretary of the Latin American Bureau, was only in Cuba for a period of about three weeks at the time of the Primer Congreso Latinoamericano de Juventudes in July-August 1960.(20)

7.1.2 The Activity and Suppression of the POR(T), 1960-65

During the early 1960s, the Cuban Trotskyists’ involvement in the developing institutions suggested that they had a far from sectarian attitude to the Revolution. They participated in the work and activity of the newly established revolutionary organisations. Apart from the Movimiento de Superación del Barrio Sur de Guantánamo, POR(T) members undertook voluntary work in the countryside, participated in the literacy campaign, and joined the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, the CDRs, and the newly organised militias.(21)At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, every member of the POR(T) was in his or her respective military or militia unit and a communication sent to the Revolutionary Government on 24 October placed the organisation as a whole at the government’s disposal.(22)Indeed, as Gilly has noted, “[t]he comrades of the Cuban section [....] even adopted a resolution saying that no one could be a member who didn’t join the militia and do voluntary work.”(23) However, although such pronouncements were far from sectarian, ultimately they only amounted to a symbolic statement of the Trotskyists’ unconditional commitment to the Revolution. The POR(T)’s small membership meant that its activists’ participation in the tasks of workplace, neighbourhood and militia organisations did not affect the course of the Revolution.

The campaign against Trotskyism and, in particular, the POR(T) was initiated by various elements of the PSP during the First Latin American Youth Congress held in Havana in mid-1960. With various Trotskyist delegates from all over the Americas present,(24) the PSP resurrected the old baseless accusations that Trotskyists by using Left-wing phrases acted as provocateurs inciting U.S. aggression, and were instruments of the FBI and CIA.(25)While these claims were eventually found to be without foundation by a special investigating commission at the Congress, it was ultimately the intervention of Juan León Ferrera who spoke and distributed a Trotskyist leaflet to the delegates which silenced the Stalinists.(26) He appeared in the military uniform of a sergeant and with the long hair identifying him as a guerrilla from the Rebel Army.

At this relatively early stage in the Revolution, although PSP cadres were already occupying intermediate positions in the institutions of the Revolutionary Government and capitalising on Fidel Castro’s calls for unity slates in the trade unions, their political position was still to the Right of the Fidelista Revolutionary Leadership. As such, the PSP’s attempt to discredit a small revolutionary Left-wing voice was in no sense sanctioned by the Revolutionary Leadership itself.(27) Instead it reflected the official communists’ long history of combat with Trotskyism and their long-standing desire to suppress the development of representative institutions which displayed a degree of class-based political autonomy. Furthermore, the PSP’s accusations that the Trotskyists were provoking U.S. aggression by calling for a struggle against native capitalist interests and for an extension of the nationalisations, were rather weak when viewed in the light of the Revolutionary Leadership’s subsequent turn against U.S. property in Cuba. Shortly after the closure of the Youth Congress Fidel Castro, apparently against the expectations of the PSP, extended the round of expropriations and nationalisations so as to include two large-scale public services, the Cuban Telephone Company and Cuban Electric Company.(28)

However, as the PSP consolidated its influence within the institutions of the Revolutionary Government in 1961, repression against the Trotskyists gained momentum. It also took on a more co-ordinated aspect with the heightening of political tension in Cuba when state power was directly threatened by the United States. In the first instance, the attempted invasion at Playa Girón in April 1961 served as a catalyst for the first round of systematic repression against the Trotskyists. In the weeks following the victory of the Revolutionary Government over the U.S. government-trained invasion force, the moves against the Trotskyists began with the seizure of issue number ten of the POR(T)’s newspaper Voz Proletaria. As a symbol of their commitment to the struggle for the right of proletarian democracy within the Revolution, between April 1960 and April 1961 the Trotskyists had produced eight editions of the newspaper Voz Proletaria in addition to a number of pamphlets.(29)The newspapers furthermore appeared with the name of the editors and the POR(T)’s public address, first José Medina and Luciano García in Guantánamo, and then Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez at Monte 12 in Havana, openly cited. Voz Proletaria’s existence was also made known to the revolutionary leadership through the direct means of posting copies to the offices of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.(30) However, on 26 May 1961, before the May issue could be distributed, a group acting on behalf of an official of the PSP-controlled Imprenta Nacional, the National Printing Office, confiscated the entire print-run of the newspaper at the private printing works where it was being prepared. Later that same day, PSP state functionaries acting on orders from the Ministry of Labour confiscated the printing plates of an edition of Trotsky’s book, The Permanent Revolution.(31)

While the order, apparently signed by the Minister of Labour himself, authorised the seizure of the POR(T)’s publications on the grounds that they constituted “counter-revolutionary propaganda”,(32) the reasons for the intervention appear to be connected with the rise of pro-Moscow influence in the Revolution. As the Trotskyists themselves suggested, the actions against their publications had the approval of various officials of the Revolutionary Government precisely because in recent months PSP cadres had consolidated their positions in the state apparatus, particularly in the trade unions and large sections of the media. This process, the POR(T) correctly observed, had been facilitated by the Cuban government’s increasing need for Soviet aid and trade in the face of economic dislocation.(33) The clamp-down had also been given the green light after Guevara sharply criticised the April 1961 edition of Voz Proletaria on national television. The particular article in question argued that the Technical Advisory Councils set up in the workplaces ostensibly to give the workers control over the production process in individual units had a bureaucratic character.(34)While there is no suggestion that Guevara himself personally sanctioned the seizure of the POR(T)’s press, in these early years of the Revolution he had nevertheless publicly signalled the Revolutionary Leadership’s perception of Trotskyism as a counter-revolutionary force.(35)

The POR(T) immediately presented a series of protests to the Revolutionary Government, demanding democratic rights of freedom of press for all revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist tendencies which unconditionally defended the Cuban Workers’ State. However, all of these went unanswered at the time.(36) Only Guevara in response to direct questioning from foreign journalists and academics attempted to justify the suppression of the POR(T)’s press on the grounds that the Trotskyists did not have paper or permission to use paper and that they hindered the development of the Revolution. He even went so far as to suggest that the proximity of the POR(T)’s Guantánamo branch to the U.S. Naval Base might not be a casual coincidence.(37) In a later interview in September 1961, though, Guevara did concede that it had been error to smash the printing plates of Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution. However, he again reflected the general attitude of the PSP in reiterating that the POR(T) was acting against the Revolution. He repeated the accusation that the Trotskyists had effectively acted as provocateurs by agitating for the Cuban people to march on the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo. He also confirmed his affinity with the PSP by asserting that because the communist party and the revolution marched together “[y]ou cannot be for the revolution and be against the Cuban Communist Party.”(38)

The central accusation made by Guevara, which was also later raised by the SWP(US), that the Cuban Trotskyists were somehow ultra-leftist provocateurs is based on a campaign which the POR(T) allegedly launched from the pages of Voz Proletaria demanding the expulsion of U.S. military forces from Cuban territory. The principal reference to the POR(T)’s own publications to support this interpretation was an article in the first issue of the newspaper which discussed the conflict between the U.S. authorities and Cuban workers at the Base. This comprehensive article, though stating that “together, the workers of the Naval Base, the people of Guantánamo and Caímanera and the Cuban masses must prepare the struggle for the definitive expulsion of imperialism”(39) was far from a provocative incitement to storm the Naval Base. Instead it emphasised the defence of the trade union organisations inside the Base. The main point which the POR(T) made was that the workers of Guantánamo should not accept the dismissal of a single worker or trade union activist. The anti-trade union campaign, they claimed, was part of the U.S. authorities’ attempt to demoralise the work-force and permit the growth of a pro-Batista trade union beach-head in the region. In also noting that the workers themselves had formed a guard to protect the base from U.S.-sponsored acts of auto-sabotage, the isolated phrase calling for the expulsion of imperialism from the Base can largely be seen, as Gilly has described, as a propaganda slogan similar to that of calling for the expulsion of imperialism from the Panama Canal.(40)Furthermore, as Gilly has noted, the absence of any other articles in Voz Proletaria about the Naval Base underlines the fact that even this call for the expulsion of imperialism was hardly central to the POR(T)’s programme.(41)

In addition to this enduring though largely hollow accusation, further allegations against Trotskyism appeared in a series of articles in the daily Aclaraciones column in the PSP’s newspaper Hoy in June 1962.(42)Continuing to peddle the old myths which had underpinned the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, the PSP presented Trotskyist forces outside the Soviet Union as being in the pay of imperialists whose principal task was to discredit the communist parties.(43) The PSP likewise played their ‘unity’ card in repeating their concocted potted history of Trotskyism in Cuba. Ignoring the fact that it had actually been the Cuban Communist Party which had labelled all non-PCC forces as social-fascist, if not plainly fascist, during the Revolution of the 1930s, Hoy again misrepresented Trotskyism’s history in Cuba. It informed its readers that following instructions from the international Trotskyist movement the Cuban Trotskyists had entered Joven Cuba in order to oppose more effectively the unity of the revolutionary forces. The PSP also employed the old accusation that the Cuban Trotskyists had then joined the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico), stimulating its anti-communism, and that through the Trotskyist leader Mujal they had worked for the police forces in the labour movement in the 1940s and 50s. According to the PSP, in this post-World War Two period the Trotskyists put themselves at the unconditional service of U.S. imperialism in order to divide the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba and introduce gangsterism, corruption and bureaucracy into the trade union movement. Extrapolating these slanderous accusations to the post-1959 period, the PSP portrayed Trotskyism as a movement still used by U.S. imperialism in Latin America against the workers’ movement. With specific reference to Cuba, the PSP posited that the Trotskyist International had apparently sent some of its agents to Cuba in order to reorganise the group and its activities with the aim of creating confusion and impeding the development of the Revolution.(44)

Up until this point in mid-1962, the POR(T) had only suffered the arrest and victimisation of one member, a railway worker in Guantánamo, in the run up to celebrations to mark the 26 July in 1961.(45) However, the PSP’s focused attacks on Trotskyism in June 1962 served as a prelude to a more systematic campaign of physical harassment in mid- to late 1962. With the PSP having further secured leading positions and influence in the direction of the Revolution after Fidel Castro’s open declaration of the socialist nature of the Revolution, leading Trotskyists were subjected to a round of arrests in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the POR(T)’s Second National Conference held between 24 and 26 August 1962.(46)Significantly, this event also challenged the one-party Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas (ORI) project which the Trotskyists did not apply to join as a group on the basis that it was not a political party within which ideas could be disseminated and a discussion of programme initiated, but was an apparatus of government operating in a Stalinist fashion.(47)On 18 August, Idalberto and Juan León Ferrera Ramírez were detained after having distributed a leaflet at a Congress of Sugar Cane Co-operatives,(48)and on 20 August, the anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination, the police banned a commemorative meeting in Guantánamo.(49) Immediately following the POR(T)’s National Conference, the party’s leader in Havana, Idalberto Ferrera Acosta together with José Lungarzo were arrested on 30 August. With no concrete charges being levelled against the POR(T) or its members, all four comrades were released on 1 September.(50)

The POR(T)’s Second National Conference, as well as the rise in tension in the lead up to the Missile Crisis, spurred the Cuban Trotskyists on to produce an A4-sized mimeographed fortnightly bulletin from September 1962 under the name of its old newspaper Voz Proletaria. The Trotskyists claimed that it had a circulation of 1,000 copies.(51)According to the POR(T) activists, while this newspaper was still not officially banned, their request that it be printed by state print works was formally rejected in November on the grounds that there was no paper.(52) Despite the heightening harassment and the bulletin’s forced mimeographed format, the Trotskyists once more rejected the option of publishing their organ in a clandestine manner. While not able to influence the political make-up of any trade union or revolutionary organisation outside the centres in which their small group of members operated, the decision to publish the party’s public address, the apartment of Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, and distribute the bulletin openly, was again important as a symbolic gesture. It was part of the struggle for the legal existence of all revolutionary tendencies in what they were then terming the Cuban ‘Workers’ State’.

From the launch of the Voz Proletaria bulletin in September 1962 until the forced dissolution of the POR(T) as an organised party in April 1965, the Trotskyists’ activity was punctuated by even greater repression. At the time of the Missile Crisis in October 1962, the Guantánamo branch suffered the arrest of its leader José Medina and the transfer of a number of its members from their regular places of work.(53)In Havana the Argentinian envoy José Lungarzo was again arrested on 30 October 1962,(54) eventually being deported to Argentina on 21 December 1962 with no apparent concern for his life or liberty on arrival there.(55) On 6 March 1963 the State Security services confiscated the printing equipment for Voz Proletaria and detained Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez, its editor, for a day. Although such acts of repression had previously been carried out on the initiative of a PSP-influenced sector of the police and state apparatus, as the failed ORI project gave way to the Unified Party of Socialist Revolution (PURS) in 1963, for the first time the Cuban Trotskyists placed responsibility for these latest repressive measures on the Revolutionary Government itself.(56)Boldly rebutting the accusations of ‘divisionism’ levelled against those communists who proposed different strategies to those of the official communists, the POR(T) also referred to the repressive measures as “blackmail and political terrorism.”(57)

The harassment was stepped up in mid-1963. Various Trotskyists were forcibly transferred to new centres of work where they had no contacts or influence. The late-May edition of Voz Proletaria reported how the transfer of Roberto Tejera, accused of being a ‘Trotskyist divisionist’ was proposed to a meeting of workers.(58) While this was rejected by the meeting, the attempt to implement transfers carried on elsewhere. On 8 June, Andrés Alfonso was arrested and threatened by State Security services, and though again released within a few hours, he had thereby been prevented from attending a trade union meeting. Amidst apparent calls from his work-mates against such intimidation he was transferred to another workplace outside Havana. As the POR(T) claimed, this was a de facto sacking.(59) In Guantánamo, a similar sanction of transfer was proposed in the case of José Medina. According to Voz Proletaria, his transfer from the railways to a farm was proposed as a punishment for publishing a leaflet calling for trade union democracy.(60)Medina was later suspended from his work without pay.(61) The dismissal of the Trotskyists from their workplaces not only removed them from the local trade union milieu in which they had a proven history of dedication to the labour movement, but also carried on the tradition of victimisation against the Trotskyists in the Guantánamo region which had started in the era of Batista.

Adolfo Gilly, after more than nine months of journalistic work and internal POR(T) activity was arrested and deported from Cuba in October 1963. This took place shortly after the POR(T)’s publication in September of the pamphlet Las Tareas Económicas y la Política del Estado Obrero which he had written under a pseudonym,(62) and a few weeks after an International Architecture Congress where the Trotskyists had intervened as an organised fraction.(63) Measures against the Cuban Trotskyists themselves led progressively to criminal charges and a trial. On 9 November 1963, when Andrés Alfonso went to discuss the possibility of his return to his original workplace, he was arrested for distributing copies of Voz Proletaria to those work-mates who usually took a copy.(64) After Alfonso’s companion Floridia Fraga protested against his detention at her CDR, she was also arrested on 1 December. This was followed by the detention of Ricardo Ferrera on 2 December after he went to make enquiries about her.(65)Although the POR(T) held its Third National Conference in January 1964,(66) this round of arrests announced the beginning of the end for the POR(T) as an organised party. According to a report in the U.S. Trotskyist journal Spartacist based on an interview with Juan León Ferrera, in the spring of 1964 all three were taken to a trial which was closed to the public. “They were charged with: (1) distributing an illegal paper, (2) advocating the overthrow of the Cuban government, and (3) being critical of Fidel Castro. Floridia Fraga and Ricardo Ferrara [sic] were sentenced to two years each while Andrés Alfonso received a sentence of five years.”(67)

The clamp-down continued when Roberto Tejera was arrested after he went to enquire about his three comrades. Then the POR(T)’s General Secretary, Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, was arrested at his home. With his apartment also serving as the POR(T)’s office, numerous “copies of the paper and other documents were confiscated.”(68)After a trial at which both were found guilty on the same charges of alleged counter-revolutionary activity as the others, Tejera was sentenced to six years in prison and, indicating the political character of the repression, Ferrera received nine years, the most severe sentence.(69)

At this point in 1964, the fate of the Cuban Trotskyists imprisoned in this first round of political trials was conditioned by the intervention of Che Guevara. Guevara had attempted to justify the suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists in 1961, loyally repeating the criticisms of the pro-Moscow PSP members. However, his disillusionment with the Soviet Communist Party and the ‘Sovietisation’ of the direction of the Cuban Revolution had become increasingly apparent in the period following the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Not only had he vented his anger at the USSR’s unwillingness to fulfil their commitment to send and, if necessary, use the nuclear missiles,(70) but he had partially broken with Stalinism over the issue of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and spreading the revolution to other countries. As described in Section 3.4.2, Guevara’s criticisms of the Soviets’ strategy led the more ardent pro-Moscow communists to characterise him privately as a Maoist if not Trotskyist.

As it became evident that Fidel Castro was beginning to align Cuba with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute, at the same time as Guevara’s economic strategy was also losing ground in favour of the policy options desired by the pro-Soviet wing of the Cuban leadership, so Che’s personal position towards the Cuban Trotskyists softened. A number of Latin American Trotskyists had been incorporated into his various guerrilla projects,(71) and Guevara simply no longer had any need to support the suppression of the dissident Trotskyist communists in order to defend a wider political position which he had evidently lost. Ricardo Napuri, a Peruvian who worked with Guevara in Cuba between 1959-64 in his various guerrilla projects, has gone so far as to argue that Guevara initially supported the suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists more out of the need to avoid losing positions in the leadership in the face of pressures from Moscow and the advance of the pro-Moscow PSP members in the G-2, the State Security services, and other revolutionary institutions, rather than out of any personal anti-Trotskyist conviction.(72)

Disillusioned with Moscow and finding himself on the losing slope in the internal leadership struggles, Guevara increasingly expressed and acted upon his own personal convictions. No longer having any particular axe to grind against the Trotskyists, who themselves shared Guevara’s sympathies for the Chinese in the Sino-Soviet dispute, he was instrumental in freeing a number of the POR(T) members imprisoned in La Cabaña jail in Havana. Roberto Tejera was released on the orders of Guevara the day after he had been interviewed by Che personally about his supposed crimes.(73)Similarly, Armando Machado was released from prison in Havana on Guevara’s initiative.(74)

However, in Oriente where Guevara had little influence over which individuals remained imprisoned, the repression against the POR(T) continued. It culminated in the arrest of the Guantánamo section of the POR(T) in late 1964 and early 1965, less than a year before the formal founding of the new Cuban Communist Party. With the Trotskyists’ mimeographed bulletin Voz Proletaria having ceased publication and their small but symbolic intervention in revolutionary institutions having been broken, the members of the POR(T) found themselves in prison en masse. The political nature of this clamp-down in 1964-65 was demonstrated by the sensitivity which the authorities displayed in not arresting Mary Low Machado, a participant in POR(T) meetings, due to the protection which her foreign passport granted her,(75)or Juan León Ferrera Ramírez because he had worked in Guevara’s own exemplary voluntary quartet of cane cutters.(76)

In Santiago de Cuba, José Medina Campos, Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez, Luciano García, Elías Suárez, Antonio Medina Campos, and Guido Brañas Medina were all charged with alleged crimes against the state. The tribunal which heard their case in March 1965 found them guilty of coming to agreement among themselves and with as yet unknown third persons to conspire against the Cuban government, and having “organised a counter-revolutionary movement called the ‘Partido Obrero Revolucionario Trotskista’” in Guantánamo.(77)In language similar to that employed during the Moscow Show Trials in the 1930s, the Sentencing Report stated that “following the orientations of Yankee imperialism they formed a study circle in which they discussed the best way to sow confusionism and divisionism among the Cuban population [....] as well as publishing a counter-revolutionary bulletin [....] called ‘La Voz Proletaria’ in which they published false news and information and circulated a large amount of counter-revolutionary propaganda [....], defaming the leaders of the Revolution and criticising the Revolutionary Laws.”(78) According to the tribunal, all this activity was apparently undertaken while the Trotskyists awaited the landing of mercenaries who sought to overthrow violently the Cuban government. Again demonstrating the political nature of the alleged crimes, Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez was sentenced to eight years imprisonment, José Medina received five years, and Luciano García, Elías Suárez, Antonio Medina and Guido Brañas each received three year sentences.(79)

In Havana, Roberto Acosta was also arrested in early 1965 after a mimeographed version of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed with a new Cuban introduction was printed in his house.(80) When Guevara returned from Africa he apparently became aware of Acosta’s arrest and detention because of the Trotskyist’s absence from his post in the Ministry of Industry. Having already lost the strategic arguments over revolutionary strategy, Guevara convened a meeting with Acosta.(81)According to Roberto Acosta, although the meeting took place in the presence of officials from G-2, Guevara expressed the view that Acosta was a revolutionary, that if the Trotskyists thought they were right then they should continue the struggle to obtain what they were fighting for, and that at some point in the future Trotskyist publications would be legal.(82)As Guevara said, “Acosta, you can’t kill ideas with blows".(83)Assuring Acosta that he would be freed shortly,(84)Guevara apparently closed the meeting with an embrace and the words: “See you in the next trenches".(85)

A few days later, officials of G-2 returned with the proposal that all the Trotskyists would be released on condition that they agreed to cease all organised activity and refrain from publishing any material.(86)While during previous periods of imprisonment the Trotskyists had carried out political work amongst other prisoners, drawing up re-educational plans which defended the Revolution at the same time as defending their own programme and the POR(T)’s right to legal existence,(87) other political considerations appear to have taken precedence. Specifically, with questions being raised about Guevara’s whereabouts as his disappearance from public life became evident, the Trotskyists knew that they no longer had any protection from the prospect of lengthy periods of incarceration.(88)

Roberto Acosta and Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez consequently travelled to Santiago de Cuba where at a meeting of the imprisoned Trotskyists, their relatives and sympathisers as well as the security services, Ferrera spoke on behalf of the POR(T). Although he restated the POR(T)’s position of unconditional defence of the Cuban Revolution while criticising the Revolution’s bureaucratic aspects, he also spoke of the need for unity.(89)Having agreed to dissolve the POR(T) and cease publishing the newspaper Voz Proletaria and all other Trotskyist material, the jailed Trotskyists were released before the end of April 1965.(90)

The POR(T), then, was only a small group whose limited base in the working class movement meant that its activity had little effect on the course of the Revolution. However, its fate in the period 1959-65 was in many respects a barometer for the ebb and flow of pro-Moscow influence on the course of the Revolution. That is, the Trotskyists’ activity and struggle for existence was of significance in terms of demonstrating the fate of working class democracy in Cuba and the Revolutionary Leadership’s alignment with the USSR on a number of central policy issues. In the first place, there is no question that the POR(T) was involved in counter-revolutionary insurgency and sabotage, or in acts to provoke U.S. military intervention in the Guantánamo region. On the contrary, their activity demonstrated that they generally sought to participate in the organisations of the new Cuban state and, however symbolically, in the unconditional defence of the Revolutionary Government against U.S. imperialism. Initially, the Revolution’s ‘free-wheeling’ atmosphere protected the Trotskyists against the anti-democratic zeal of the PSP. Indeed, although the POR(T)’s activity in 1960 was met with the traditional invective which Stalinist groups reserved for their dissident Trotskyist rivals, these accusations initially found no support outside the confines of the PSP. It was only as the Revolutionary Leadership increasingly relied on Soviet aid that the old PSP cadres’ attacks on the POR(T) were legitimised. That is, while the old pesepistas made opportunist use of periods of crisis, most notably the Playa Girón invasion and the Missile Crisis, to include the Trotskyists in a security clamp-down, the evidence indicates that the measures taken against the POR(T) were eventually sanctioned by the Revolutionary Leadership itself at a time when Fidel Castro was broadly acquiescing to policy options favoured by the Kremlin.

While responsibility for the suppression of the POR(T) demonstrably lies with the leadership of the Revolution, the Cuban Trotskyists’ understanding of the revolutionary process also contributed to the disappearance of Trotskyism as an organised party in 1965. In this section I argue that despite Roberto Acosta’s suggestion that his comrades chose personal liberty before political principle in accepting the dissolution of their party as a condition for their release, the POR(T)’s decision to accede formally to the Revolutionary Government’s insistence on the one-party character of the Cuban political landscape was also determined by the Trotskyists’ long-term failure to identify unambiguously the working class as the principal agent for revolutionary change.

The Trotskyists ostensibly adhered to the fundamental postulates of the theory of Permanent Revolution.(91) However, missing from their analysis was the understanding that it was the working class through its own self-clarified democratic organisations which had to be the executor of the revolutionary measures against capitalist property relations. At the end of 1960, shortly after the large-scale nationalisations of banks and industry and the effective state monopoly on foreign trade were carried out and instituted by the Revolutionary Government, the POR(T) contended that these steps in and by themselves confirmed the validity of the theory of Permanent Revolution. They argued that the Revolution by qualitatively jumping objective stages of development, rapidly passing from bourgeois democratic to socialist economic measures, had demonstrated that there was no room for a democratic capitalist stage in the struggle for genuine national liberation.(92) Given that this ‘uninterrupted’ process had been executed by forces other than those of the democratic organs of the working class, the theory of Permanent Revolution thereby became an objective process guiding the Revolution rather than a conscious proletarian strategy.

Despite the fact that the organisations of the masses themselves had not erected the new state apparatus, the Trotskyists were among the first to confer the status of a ‘Workers’ State’ on the new post-1959 revolutionary order.(93)Furthermore, although they appended the important caveat that the political aspects of the Revolution lagged behind the economic ones,(94) they nevertheless felt that the Revolutionary Leadership of Fidel Castro was ultimately capable of carrying out the political tasks of the socialist revolution.

Believing that the Revolutionary Government was fulfilling the POR(T)’s own revolutionary socialist programme, albeit in a bureaucratic manner,(95) the Cuban Trotskyists thereby limited their criticisms to what they perceived to be deformations within the post-1959 revolutionary order. From the POR(T)’s founding, they opposed the incipient paternalism which, in their view, led the Revolutionary Government to impose measures on the working class in an authoritarian manner. They argued, for example, that control from above and the exclusion of working class from the direction of production and the state were the root causes of the problems of absenteeism and low productivity which the Revolution faced as economic planning was instituted.(96)

Hand in hand with its criticisms against the tendencies towards paternalism and bureaucratic strangulation of the political aspects of the revolution, the POR(T) advanced a number of demands. A central thrust of its programme was the defence of proletarian democracy and calls for acceptance of diverse forms of revolutionary activity. Specifically, the POR(T) called for democracy in the trade unions, and opposed the creation of a single political party.

In line with Lenin’s position over the role of trade unions,(97) the Cuban Trotskyists called for trade union independence from the state and the establishment of the widest degree of democracy in the trade union movement. Arguing that these were essential in order to ensure that working class support for the deepening of the Revolution could be freely given, they called for the election of trade union leaders without the imposition of single lists or the intervention of any state institutions in support or otherwise of any revolutionary tendency.(98) In the political arena, the POR(T) similarly defended the right of all working class parties and tendencies which defended the Revolution to open and legal existence. To their credit, during the period 1960-65 the Trotskyists consistently stood for freedom of expression and action for all revolutionary tendencies provided that they defended what the POR(T) considered to be the proletarian state. They argued that such groups should be able to defend their ideas publicly and without harassment through all the mediums of communication of the Cuban Workers’ State and that the masses should have the right to choose their representatives from among these revolutionary tendencies and positions.(99)

As early as May 1960, an article in Voz Proletaria set out the Trotskyists’ opposition to a single party which unified the M26J, the Directorio Revolucionario and the PSP. It characterised the M26J as an organisation structured more around the requirements of insurrectionary action than a political programme, and the Directorio Revolucionario and PSP as apparatuses without mass popular support. The latter, they argued, had been tied to a programme of tepid reformism in alliance with the so-called ‘progressive bourgeoisie’.(100) Perceptively arguing against the imposition of a single party monolithic structure a year before the ORI was formally founded, the POR(T) wrote:

“[t]he formation of tendencies and their struggle inside the Workers’ State and in its political and trade union organisations is nothing more than the expression of the heterogeneity of the working classes. Within the working class itself, they are the expression of the different interests and layers which are manifested in the different solutions advanced in an attempt to resolve the problem of the epoch of the transition to socialism. To try to smother these tendencies with the dogmatic and sectarian argument of a supposed imposed ‘unity’, of the absolutist monolithicism of an ‘official’ line dictated from above, would be to want to wind back history to return to the conditions which produced the sinister period of Stalinist repression, already condemned and left behind by the communist workers’ movement.”(101)

However, despite this principled defence of their perspective of dictatorship over the bourgeoisie and democracy for the working class, the Cuban Trotskyists’ criticisms were not directed at forging an alternative revolutionary vanguard to lead a political revolution against Fidel Castro and/or the rising bureaucracy controlling the institutions of the Cuban state. Rather than seeking to develop democratic working class organisations which could ultimately challenge both the institutions of the Bonapartist communist state and pro-capitalist groups for the leadership of the masses, the Cuban Trotskyists instead became little more than an irksome appendage to the Fidelista leadership.

The reason for this failure to insist unambiguously that only the working class could be the executor of revolutionary change had its origins in the Cuban Trotskyists’ own history as well as in international Trotskyism’s post-war belief that official communist parties and petty bourgeois nationalist forces could serve as blunt instruments for revolution. Taking the PBL’s, the POR’s and ultimately the Fourth International’s post-World War Two faith in the potential of broad anti-imperialist blocs to its logical conclusion, the Cuban Trotskyists’ perspective of building an independent Trotskyist party was merely aimed at encouraging the mass organisations into pressurising Fidel Castro, Guevara and other Left tendencies in the Revolutionary Leadership into taking steps against bureaucratic deformations and permitting the full participation of the masses in the questions of power and control.(102)

The POR(T) justified this perspective of ‘pressurising’ the Castro leadership by depicting the underlying motor behind political developments in the Revolution as a permanent battle between the maturity and pressure of the masses on the one hand, and the arbitrary, bureaucratic imposition from above by Stalinist tendencies on the other. The Trotskyists argued that the leadership of Fidel Castro struck out at the bureaucratic tendencies only when the masses displayed their disgust against bureaucratic excesses and exerted their influence on the Revolutionary Leadership.(103)This erroneous assessment of the innate revolutionary socialist capacity of the Fidelista Revolutionary Leadership furthermore led the POR(T) to describe Castro’s so-called ‘frictional’ alliance with the PSP as a defensive move conditioned by the Revolutionary Leadership’s lack of confidence in the masses as well as Castro’s own ideological weakness, that is, his empiricism, which did not allow him to fully understand the immense dangers of Stalinism and the bureaucracy.(104)

Given, then, what the Cuban Trotskyists understood to be the Revolutionary Leadership’s underlying revolutionary will, the POR(T) did not see the need to mount a struggle which would ultimately overthrow or seize power from Fidel Castro.(105) It instead pursued a policy of attempting to push Castro’s leadership forward with criticisms and persuasion, showing him the way forward and instilling in him the confidence to open up the organisations within the Revolution to the democratic participation of the masses. The Trotskyists characterised the Cuban state as a ‘Workers’ State ‘sui generis’’,(106) arguing that over the long-term only reform and not a political revolution against the Revolutionary Leadership was required to direct the transformation of socialism. As J. Posadas wrote in a letter published in the Voz Proletaria bulletin:

“[w]e do not want to overthrow Fidel, but to drive his leadership onwards and upwards.
“This is the process of the political revolution ‘sui generis’ which is currently developing in Cuba. The Cuban government has adopted a number of positions which we must reject, criticise and directly oppose with our own positions now. But this by way of putting pressure on him, of influencing him, and obliging him to recognise the pressure of the masses. In the ultimate analysis we are a part of the pressure of the world revolution, we represent the conscience of the leadership of the colonial revolution, of the political revolution, of the proletarian revolution.”(107)

The Cuban Trotskyists effectively relegated the role of their own party to one of criticising the imposition of decisions from above and pushing the Revolutionary Leadership forward. As J. Posadas himself contended, far from attempting to lead the proletarian anti-imperialist revolution, the fight in which the Cuban Trotskyists had engaged for the open functioning of the POR(T) was ultimately aimed at testing the maturity of the Castro leadership. J. Posadas argued that when the Revolutionary Leadership recognised the POR(T)’s activity and demands for the intervention of the masses, then Castro’s Leadership could be deemed to have made the qualitative ideological advance to support their Trotskyist vision of the revolutionary process.(108)

This abandonment of the independent proletarian struggle and the building of a proletarian Marxist party as prerequisites for socialist revolution was furthermore reflected in the POR(T)’s reinterpretation of the Fourth International’s old catastrophic ‘war-revolution cycle’ perspective. In response to the Missile Crisis, the POR(T) contended that an inevitable nuclear war would signal the final balancing of accounts between capitalism and socialism, leading to the inescapable victory of socialism.(109)Arguing for a Soviet first strike, the Trotskyists in the face of the alleged inactivity of the industrialised proletariat in advanced capitalist countries called on the Cuban leadership to form a world-wide anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist United Front incorporating the socialist, communist and Trotskyist parties and radical national liberation movements of the Third World.(110) However, the aim of the Posadist bloc of classes was not even the exposure of the ultimate inability of social democracy, Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism to lead the revolution. As a caricature of Trotsky’s strictly defined conception of the Anti-Imperialist United Front, the Posadists’ apparent goal was to demonstrate the revolutionary readiness of the masses and to pressurise the Moscow leadership into risking a pre-emptive nuclear war. Implicitly accepting Pablo’s argument that there was no to time to construct Trotskyist parties and completely failing to appreciate that it had been the Comintern’s Popular Frontism which had disabled the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement, the POR(T) effectively identified a broad anti-imperialist bloc as the principal agent for revolutionary change. This constituted a de facto return full-circle to the early Cuban oppositionists’ thesis which argued that the working class was too weak to lead the revolution.

In sum, then, the Cuban Trotskyists viewed their party as an instrument reflecting the already ‘unconscious’ or ‘creeping’ revolutionary readiness of the masses and the Left tendencies in the Fidelista leadership rather than as a prerequisite for a successful proletarian revolution. Just as the decline and eventual disappearance of the POR in the 1950s was directly attributable to the Trotskyists’ own theoretical weakness in identifying the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism as effective vehicles for revolutionary change, so the POR(T)’s dissolution in 1965 could, in part, similarly be attributed to this same failing. That is, the Cuban POR(T) represented a continuation of the politics of the previous Trotskyist groups in Cuba and, in certain respects, other Latin American Trotskyist groups which had found themselves in the midst of an unfolding revolution. Recognising that the Cuban Government was one which rested on collective property relations sponsored by the Soviet Union, the Cuban Trotskyists’ perspectives were much the same as those of the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the 1952-53 Bolivian national revolution. That is, both the Cuban and Bolivian Trotskyist parties effectively renounced the need for a working class revolutionary party to lead a socialist transformation of society and relegated their respective roles to pressurising the existing petty bourgeois Revolutionary Leadership. Significantly, this broad undelineated bloc strategy which also reduced the theory of Permanent Revolution to an objective process paralleled Guevara’s thought in the mid-1960s as he prepared his departure from Cuba. That is, the Posadists, like Guevara, rejected the concepts of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and constructing socialism within the confines of a small, isolated Latin American country in favour of a broad anti-imperialist bloc perspective which identified non-proletarian forces as the revolutionary agent.(111)

7.3 The View from Abroad: The Cuban POR(T) and the Fourth Internationals

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 acted as catalyst for a round of splits and fusions in the international Trotskyist movement.(112) In this section I outline how the different international tendencies responded to the Cuban Revolution and how these different analyses largely determined the international Trotskyist milieu’s response to the suppression of working class democracy and the plight of the Trotskyists suppressed and locked up in the Cuban government’s prisons. The central thread of my argument is that the Cuban Trotskyists were largely abandoned by a sizeable proportion of the international Trotskyist movement as some of the latter’s largest sections became increasingly infused with opportunist, broad anti-imperialist bloc strategies which had first been introduced into the Comintern during the Second Period in the late 1920s and then with more vigour in the post-1935 Period.

The International Secretariat and the International Committee of the Fourth International, the two major international Trotskyist tendencies in 1959, both greeted the Revolution with guarded enthusiasm. However, while all groups agreed that it was necessary to defend the Cuban Revolution and the Castro government against U.S. aggression, by 1960-61 after the large-scale nationalisations had been effected, differences began to emerge over the revolutionary capacity of the leadership of Fidel Castro and the nature of the Cuban state. These differences provided the rationale for the ‘reunification’ of different sectors of the Fourth International in 1963.

While the International Secretariat of the Fourth International was largely cautious in its initial analysis of the possibilities of the 1959 Revolution, by mid-1960 after the expropriation of major U.S. companies in Cuba, all groups affiliated to the International Secretariat were moving towards characterising the new state as some form of ‘Workers’ State’.(113) Having become increasingly uncritical of the Revolutionary Leadership they soon came to argue that the whole revolutionary process in Cuba provided confirmation that socialist revolution could be secured not via the conscious struggle of revolutionary communists but by the blunt instruments of petty bourgeois nationalism under pressure from the popular masses.

In contrast to the general unanimity among the International Secretariat groups, the Trotskyists affiliated to the International Committee of the Fourth International reacted in diametrically opposed ways. All groups under the International Committee umbrella were initially cautious in their analysis of the Revolution, with the SWP(US) arguing that Fidel Castro was “consciously resisting the tendency to continue in a socialist direction” well into 1960.(114)However, in mid-1960 while the Socialist Labour League, the British group inside the International Committee, set out on a hostile course broadly categorising Cuba as a capitalist state with a Bonapartist leadership ultimately committed to holding back the revolution in Latin America,(115) the SWP(US) began to glorify and exaggerate the nature and possibilities of the Revolution in Cuba. Having been unable to break out of the confines of a small, isolated propaganda group and under the increased pressure of the witch-hunt against the Left in general in the U.S. in the 1950s, the SWP(US) experienced a rapid rise in influence as it took over the leadership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, giving this Cuban solidarity organisation in the U.S. a national structure.(116)From this point the SWP(US) became increasingly conciliatory in tone towards the Revolutionary Government in Cuba as it sought to win fresh recruits in the New Left milieu which was passionately and largely uncritically enthusiastic about the merits of Castro and the Cuban Revolution.(117)Interpreting the theory of Permanent Revolution as an objective dynamic guiding the revolutionary process in Cuba, the North American Trotskyists thereafter identified the Fidelista leadership as ‘unconsciously Trotskyist’ in the sense that it was acting empirically in line with the strategy of a proletarian revolutionary vanguard.(118)The SWP(US) thereby argued for the construction of a revolutionary party through the M26J, agreeing with Pablo that no independent Trotskyist party needed to be built in order to secure and extend the socialist revolution.(119) This about turn in point of theory provoked the formation of the Revolutionary Tendency, a minority faction in the SWP(US) which insisted on the building of a Trotskyist party independent from the governmental apparatus and Fidelista leadership.

The rapprochement between the SWP(US) and the bulk of the groups adhering to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International led to the 1963 ‘Reunification Congress’ and founding of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec). In contrast to the increasing hostility of the remaining affiliates to the International Committee, the USec groups not only contended that the Cuban Revolution had delivered a blow against U.S. imperialist interests, but, ignoring Cuba’s dependency on the Soviet Union for aid, asserted that it had shown that non-proletarian forces under pressure from the masses could unconsciously roughly follow the path outlined by Trotsky in his theory of Permanent Revolution.

Just, then, as the Cuban Revolution and the nature of the post-1959 Cuban state was characterised in a variety of ways by the various international Trotskyist groups, and acted as catalyst for their international organisational realignment, so the issue of the suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists in the 1960s was similarly addressed in different ways by the various Trotskyist groups. All the international groups publicised and/or protested against the first seizure of Voz Proletaria and the smashing of the printing plates of Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution in mid-1961, albeit with varying degrees of commitment to freedom of expression for proletarian tendencies inside the Revolution. However, after the ‘reunification’ of the bulk of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International and the SWP(US) in 1963, it was largely the Posadist Fourth International and Spartacists, two tendencies which rejected the de facto ‘dissolutionist’ perspectives of the USec, which publicised the fate of the Cuban Trotskyists.

The Posadists, first in the Latin American Bureau of the Fourth International and then in the distinct Posadist Fourth International, essentially shared the International Secretariat’s view that the Cuban state was a Workers’ State and that Fidel Castro represented the revolutionary socialist wing of the leadership against the bureaucratic Stalinist tendency. However, their formal adherence to the perspective of constructing a Trotskyist party independent of the Fidelista apparatus led them to be unrelenting in their protests against the suppression of the POR(T) in Cuba. Given their organisational links with the Cuban Trotskyists, they were unsurprisingly the first to bring news of the detention of the POR(T) members through their press across Latin America and Europe.(120)Their calls protesting against their comrades’ subsequent periods of incarceration continued through 1964-65.(121) The Posadists characterised these measures taken against their Cuban section as “a pitiful violation of Socialist principles. It is a counter-revolutionary attack on proletarian democracy and the masses” which was part of the fight between those groups in the Cuban leadership which were sensitive to the masses and those which represented and defended the privileges of the state bureaucracy.(122)The Posadists called on all working class and anti-imperialist organisations to address protests to the Cuban government in the name of the unconditional defence of the Cuban Workers’ State, proletarian democracy and the widest intervention of the masses in the development of the Revolution towards socialism.(123)

With a degree of reason, the Posadists contended that the rounds of arrests and imprisonments largely reflected the influence of pro-Moscow Stalinists in the direction of the Revolution. However, displaying their illusions concerning the revolutionary potential of Fidel Castro, they asserted that the repression was not a manifestation of the Revolutionary Leadership’s anti-socialist essence but rather that of Fidel Castro’s lack of confidence in the masses and his resultant perceived need to assure himself of the support of the bureaucratic apparatus.(124) The Cuban Trotskyists’ eventual release in April 1965 was similarly viewed with wholly misplaced optimism. Conferring great significance on the circumscribed freedom of their Cuban comrades, the Posadists presented it as a defeat for the Soviet bureaucracy and a victory for the revolutionary forces in Cuba and the inexorable advance of the ‘sui generis’ political revolution in Cuba.(125) J. Posadas himself wrote:

“[t]he freeing of our comrades is an historic event comparable to the great advances in the revolutionary struggles of humanity. It is the incessant progress of the world revolution, our fight and our uncompromising activity (including that of our Cuban comrades) that has enabled the release of the ignominiously imprisoned comrades.”(126)

The attitude of the U.S. Trotskyists in the SWP(US) towards the Cuban POR(T), on the other hand, became ever more equivocal over time largely reflecting their increasingly uncritical approach to the Cuban Revolution. Until the end of May 1961, the SWP(US) was unambiguous in demonstrating its fraternal support for the POR(T). During the First Latin American Youth Congress in mid-1960 a fraternal delegate from the SWP(US) left his seat in the observers’ area to sit at the side of the International Secretariat Trotskyists as an expression of solidarity when the old pesepistas launched an attack on the Cuban Trotskyists.(127)The SWP(US) and POR(T) furthermore exchanged their respective newspapers, The Militant and Voz Proletaria, and the SWP(US) acted as an international contact enabling the Cubans to develop communications with Trotskyist groups further afield.(128) Indeed, up until the initial moves by state institutions to suppress the Cuban POR(T), the SWP(US) viewed the POR(T)’s existence as a positive indication of the direction of the Cuban Revolution. Rather ironically, as late as 20 May 1961 Joseph Hansen, the editor of The Militant, stated that the mere fact that Voz Proletaria “is printed in Cuba is impressive evidence to the whole radical movement in the United States of how the capitalist press lies when it claims that no freedom of press exists in Cuba.”(129)

However, with the seizure of the Cuban Trotskyists’ press less than a week later on 26 May, the SWP(US)’s attitude to the plight of the Cuban Trotskyists became increasingly ambiguous. On receiving the news on 2 June 1961 that the National Printing Office and Ministry of Labour had taken steps against the POR(T), the SWP(US) delayed registering a protest or publicising the turn of events on the grounds that they needed more facts in order to ascertain whether or not the Revolutionary Government was actually involved.(130) At the same time, they prepared the theoretical ground for abandoning the Cuban POR(T). In a number of illuminating letters to James Cannon, Hansen for the first time criticised the Cuban Trotskyists for being sectarian and adventurers, and inviting attack from Stalinist groups. In stark contrast to the lucid critique which the U.S. Trotskyists had made of the Cuban Trotskyists in the 1930s for the PBL’s tendency to view a broad anti-imperialist bloc as a vehicle for proletarian revolution, Hansen outdid the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in embracing the theses of ‘Pabloism’. Hansen accused the POR(T) of not being “sharp enough” to fully appreciate the revolutionary potential of the Castro leadership which, in his view, excluded the possibility of the ‘Stalinisation’ of the Cuban Revolution. He argued that the POR(T) had adopted a sectarian position in making “a principle of multiplicity of parties in a workers state".(131)Hansen further criticised the Cuban Trotskyists for appearing to offer a superior leadership to the working class than that offered by Fidel Castro,(132) something which I have argued they consummately failed to do. Apparently not wanting to besmirch the SWP(US)’s new image of giving unconditional and uncritical support to the Cuban Revolution, Hansen suggested that the party make no protest on the POR(T)’s behalf in case this be taken as giving political support to the Cuban Trotskyists and the SWP(US), as a consequence, finds itself cut off from the leadership of the Revolution. Hansen wrote:

“the course of the Cuban Pabloites [i.e., POR(T)] is quite adventurous it seems to me. They have proclaimed themselves a party but they do not have an independent base in any respect except program. Their tactics in both the organizational and tactical field could scarcely be better designed to invite attack from the Stalinists for which they have no solid organizational base of defense. [....]
“We cannot assume any responsibility for such an adventurous course that is so blind to the political realities. But we could appear to assume such responsibility if we undertake a direct protest against the undemocratic action which they appear to have suffered.”(133)

Despite these reservations, however, the SWP(US) did belatedly register its uneasiness about the moves against the POR(T)’s publications. The SWP(US) subsequently explained the repression in terms of the possible “’disruptive factionalism’ ascribable to officials of the Cuban Communist Party [i.e., PSP] whose attitude toward Trotskyism might still be under the influence of indoctrination under the school of Stalinism.”(134)However, with respect to the continued repression which the POR(T) suffered in the period 1963-65, the SWP(US) was conspicuously silent on the intermittent acts of repression directed at the POR(T) and, as in 1961, The Militant only published a statement on the POR(T)’s suppression in 1965 after the facts had become known in the U.S. radical and revolutionary milieu and the Trotskyists had been conditionally released.(135)

Furthermore, like the Posadists, with whom they shared much in terms of their analysis of the Cuban state, the SWP(US) completely misinterpreted the reasons behind the attack and release of the Cuban Trotskyists in 1965. Rather than positing that the Cubans’ arrest and release reflected the effective victory of pro-Moscow tendencies in the Cuban leadership, the SWP(US) erroneously argued that the release of the Cuban Trotskyists amounted to a rectification of a miscarriage of justice and, as such, a reflection of “the struggle conducted by the Fidelista leadership against the growth of bureaucratism in Cuba".(136) This accommodation to the Castro Revolutionary Leadership ultimately led the SWP(US) to identify the Stalinist and non-proletarian nationalist leaderships in the small countries of Nicaragua, Grenada and Cuba as the focal points for a new International rather than addressing the issue of building strong proletarian sections in the more important countries of Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in Latin America. As Lister succinctly summarised, “[f]rom seeking to ‘infuse Trotskyist concepts’ into the Castroite current, the SWP[(US)] has itself been suffused completely with Castro’s populist brand of Stalinism.”(137)

Despite the clamp-down on the POR(T) as an organisation in 1965, a core of the POR(T)’s members resolved to continue their political activity after the release of the imprisoned Trotskyists in April 1965. In this section I chart the activity of the post-April 1965 nucleus of Trotskyists arguing that while their political outlook did not alter in any substantial respect, their fortunes in terms of constructing an organisation and falling victim to state-instigated repression continued to be broadly conditioned by the influence of hard-line pro-Moscow communists in the direction of the Revolution and the extent to which Fidel Castro acquiesced to the demands of Moscow for political homogeneity.

Starting out from a relatively backward level of development and isolated from other revolutions in the Americas, the collectivist transformation of the Cuban political economy in the 1960s was increasingly conditioned by demands of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s ultimate economic guarantor. While the Soviet leadership had come to the aid of the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, and Fidel Castro had acquiesced in the formation of a single revolutionary party and then finally a new Communist Party in 1965, he proved unwilling to surrender the actual leadership of the Revolution to the pro-Moscow PSP leaders. As described in Section 3.4.2, the Escalante affair was evidence of Castro’s most striking attempt to circumscribe the autonomy and authority of the old pesepistas. However, although the Kremlin was bereft of the usual compliant party apparatus with which it manipulated policy in its satellite states in Eastern Europe, Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union as an outlet for her sugar and source for her oil needs served to further tighten Moscow’s control on the organisation of political and economic structures in Cuba in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The gradual ‘Sovietisation’ of the Cuban political economy gained pace in the mid-1960s with the abandonment of a renovated industrialisation project and the institutionalisation of the self-finance planning model. As has been noted by numerous scholars,(138) this process subsequently went through various stages, first on the terrain of foreign policy with Castro’s public alignment with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute in early 1966, and culminated in the early 1970s amidst macro-economic dislocation after the failure of the ‘Ten Million Ton’ sugar harvest project with the adoption of more orthodox, Moscow-inspired internal policies and structures.(139) One repercussion of this adjustment in the Cuban Leadership’s political alignment through the late 1960s and early 70s was continued intermittent attacks on Trotskyism sanctioned by the Cuban leadership.

Fidel Castro’s first public attack on Trotskyism was made in the speech he delivered at the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana on 15 January 1966.(140)In this speech, without debating any theoretical or programmatic issues at stake, Castro denounced the followers of Trotskyism as “vulgar instruments of imperialism and reaction”,(141) the old accusation which had provided the basis of the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. This high-profile attack on Trotskyism, far from merely being an irrational outburst against an old enemy in attempt to isolate it in Latin American revolutionary circles, was intimately linked to Castro’s increasing capitulation to the policy demands of Moscow and signalled his effective support for the Kremlin in the Sino-Soviet dispute. This was demonstrated by his denunciation in the same speech of the Guatemalan Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (MR-13), a guerrilla organisation which had embraced the Guevarist-Maoist concept of a ‘socialist guerrilla force’ fighting for the direct installation of a workers’ and peasants’ government.(142) Castro’s attack on the MR-13 alleged that the Guatemalan guerrilla force had been infiltrated by Trotskyists who were agents of imperialism. As the MR-13 refused to accept the Moscow formula of a two-stage struggle for a bourgeois democratic republic, Castro used Trotskyism as a surrogate for an attack on the Guevarist-Maoist model for revolution in Latin America.(143)

This denunciation of Trotskyism was followed up by the inevitable article from Blas Roca, the General Secretary of the old PCC and PSP in Cuba, which expanded on Fidel Castro’s accusations.(144)In Central America the Cubans’ attack led to the isolation and repression of the Trotskyists, including the imprisonment of the Posadists’ leadership in Mexico and their expulsion from the MR-13 in Guatemala.(145) In Cuba the offensive signalled a renewed move against the Trotskyists who had not completely renounced the project of political intervention under the name of the POR(T). In March 1966, Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez and Luciano García were again imprisoned in Santiago de Cuba.(146)Under the Legal Clause 133 of 1965, they were sentenced to eight and three years imprisonment respectively and incorporated into a programme of political rehabilitation for those convicts considered to be counter-revolutionaries.(147)

This renewed attack, however, did not prevent the Trotskyists from continuing to draw up political programmes and draft letters to, amongst others, Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong during the late 1960s and early 70s. In these communications they continued to express the concessions which they had made throughout their history to the broad anti-imperialist front perspective of Second Period Stalinism, something which the United Secretariat of the Fourth International had more recently adopted. Displaying all the features of isolation from the reality of post-World War Two developments which had led Trotskyists to abandon the principles of working class independence and the link between the democratic tasks and the socialist revolution, the Cuban Trotskyists’ strategy centred on appeals to what they saw as the revolutionary tendency within Castro’s leadership. While the Posadists internationally broadly aligned themselves with what they termed a ‘Guevarist tendency’ and exaggerated the extent to which Guevara himself had challenged Stalinism by insisting that he had been liquidated in a Stalinist ‘coup’ in Cuba,(148) the Cuban Trotskyists continued to view Castro not as an obstacle but as a vehicle for proletarian revolution. They urged Castro to continue to lead the political revolution against Stalinist bureaucratic tendencies at home and elaborate a programme around which an International incorporating the forces of Trotskyism, the Chinese Communist Party as well as the base of official communist parties and national liberation movements could struggle for political and social revolution world-wide.(149)Completely abandoning any analysis which insisted that only the working class through its democratic organisations could execute the socialist revolution, the Cuban Trotskyists viewed the Cultural Revolution in China as the political revolution against the Chinese bureaucracy,(150)and even characterised Fidel Castro’s disastrous drive for the ‘Ten Million Ton’ harvest as the beginning of the political revolution in Cuba.(151)

Divorced from the reality of Fidel Castro’s capitulation to the policy demands of Moscow in the early 1970s and all but abandoned by the international Trotskyist movement,(152) the voice of Trotskyism was easy prey for the pro-Moscow Stalinists leading the reorganisation of political and economic structures in Cuba after the failure of the 1970 sugar harvest. Unwilling to countenance the dissemination of dissident ideas within the Revolution, even on the literary plane,(153) the remaining adherents to Trotskyism in Cuba were again arrested in 1973. Evidence presented at their trial stated that they had begun to reorganise the Political Bureau of the POR(T) with Idalberto Ferrera Acosta as the General Secretary, Juan León Ferrera as Organisational Secretary, and Jesús Andrés Vázquez Méndez as Secretary for Foreign Relations. They were accused of building Trotskyist cells in Havana and the interior, notably in Santa Clara, and attempting to recruit communist party members. The state prosecution alleged that in these party cells the Trotskyists wrote, discussed and reproduced articles and documents which were defamatory against the Revolution, the Communist Party, and the ‘Maximum Leader’ Fidel Castro. Among the allegedly slanderous articles which they produced were some which argued that Cuba as well as the other socialist countries led by the Soviet Union, were governed by privileged bureaucratic castes which ruled according to their interests, exploiting the working class. For the crimes of producing the supposedly defamatory and diversionist articles, as well as maintaining contact with foreign Trotskyists and attempting to reorganise the POR(T), the three leading members were again sentenced to lengthy periods of imprisonment. Reflecting the political nature of the charges, the leader of the group, Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, received twelve years, while Juan León Ferrera and Jesús Andrés Vázquez each received nine years.(154)

While Juan León Ferrera was released after having served only sixteen months of his sentence, a result of the remission he won due to his exemplary work in the sugar cane fields, Idalberto Ferrera Acosta served five years of his twelve year sentence. He was released in an amnesty in the late 1970s at the time of Fidel Castro’s moves towards the Carter Administration in the United States.(155)Since the release of the Ferreras in the 1970s, the Castro government has not altered its assessment of Trotskyism,(156) and the few remaining Trotskyists in Cuba have continued to write and reproduce bulletins and articles with a degree of discretion. They have also retained their links with the international movement through private meetings with visiting foreign Trotskyists from various tendencies.(157) In sum, while the Cuban Trotskyists from the early 1930s were subjected to prison sentences and victimisations under successive capitalist regimes, and indeed contributed to their own disappearance as an organised party in the 1950s through their own strategy which essentially viewed non-proletarian nationalist movements as vehicles for revolution, most recently it has been the usual Stalinist slanders characteristic of the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s which have conditioned the organisational isolation of Trotskyism in Cuba in the 1990s.

In summary, just as the PBL and POR in the 1930s and 40s failed to appreciate that it had been Stalinist Popular Frontism which had disabled the working class movement and the proletarian anti-imperialist revolution, so in the late 1950s and 60s the Cuban Trotskyists failed to offer an alternative proletarian strategy to the ‘broad bloc’ rural guerrillarism and Bonapartist Communism of Fidel Castro. The Trotskyists as individuals first gave uncritical and unconditional support to the cross-class alliance which led the insurrection against the Batista regime in the late 1950s, and then in the 1960s supported the Revolutionary Leadership of Fidel Castro and Guevara, broadly acting as a Left counsellor to the regime. The POR(T) effectively denied the validity of the revolutionary proletarian struggle and instead largely confined themselves to criticising the increasing influence of the old PSP Stalinists in Cuba and attempting to push Castro to the Left.

In addition to revealing their roots in the PBL and POR, the Cuban POR(T) also displayed its origins in the national liberation tendency of Latin American Trotskyism, a mantle which had been taken up the ‘Pabloite’ International Secretariat of the Fourth International in the 1950s and then the USec after the Reunification Congress in 1963. Like Pablo, the SWP(US) and the USec, the Cuban Trotskyists did not insist on the need for a revolutionary Marxist party to lead a working class revolution. Furthermore, despite the hostility of the SWP(US), the Cuban Trotskyists also broadly agreed with the North Americans’ transformation of the theory of Permanent Revolution from a conscious proletarian strategy to an objective process guiding the Cuban Revolution. They differed from Pablo, the SWP(US) and the USec only to the extent that they remained loyal to the concept of building an independent Trotskyist party. This revolutionary party, however, was seen as an instrument merely reflecting the already ‘unconscious Trotskyism’ and revolutionary will of the masses rather than as a prerequisite for a successful proletarian revolution.

While, then, the Trotskyists’ struggle for democratic rights for all those groups which defended the Cuban state against imperialism was, in essence, a principled stand, the caricature of Trotskyism which the Cuban Posadists developed ultimately furnished the POR(T) with an argument to justify agreeing to the forced dissolution of a Trotskyist party in 1965. That is, although the repression directed against the Trotskyists in the early 1960s, the POR(T)’s forced dissolution in 1965 and the final round of imprisonments in the 1970s were ultimately shaped by the ‘Sovietisation’ of the Revolution, the Trotskyists themselves had surrendered the reins for socialist revolution to forces other than those of the democratic organisations of the working class. Giving life to the ‘external road’ thesis of the early PBL, the POR(T) along with broad sections of mainstream Trotskyism had abandoned Trotsky’s prescription that only the conscious struggle of the organisations of the proletariat linking the tasks of the democratic revolution to socialist demands could lead and extend the anti-imperialist revolution.

FOOTNOTES

The SWP(US) was about to provoke a split in its international organisation, the USec, after the 1979 World Congress. Confirming the SWP(US)’s status as a ‘hostage’ to Stalinism, the North American’s characterised the Castro leadership as ‘revolutionary Marxist’ and proposed fusion with the Castroite current in Central America. (Back to text)

The Latin American Bureau’s transition to a distinct international tendency only occurred in 1962 after J. Posadas began to criticise the positions of Pablo and the European affiliates for their alleged intellectualism and inability to intervene in the real class struggle. See Coggiola, O, (1986), op cit, p. 32. Amongst many of J. Posadas’ more adventurist distinguishing features was a call for the USSR to launch a nuclear first strike. The then distinct Posadist tendency envisaged that out of this would come the victory of the world socialist revolution. (Back to text)

The PSP estimated that there were forty to fifty Trotskyists in Cuba in 1962. Unsigned, ‘Aclaraciones: Argumentos de los Trotskistas contra la Revolución Cubana’, Hoy (Havana), Year 24, No. 142, 19 June 1962, p. 2. (IHC(b).) An internal report made by an unnamed U.S. Trotskyist after discussions with the Cuban Trotskyists in mid-1961 placed the POR(T)’s membership at between thirty and forty. Unsigned, Report on Discussions Held with Comrades from the Cuban Section of the Fourth International (I.S.), August 14 1961. (HI: SWP Collection, Box No. 31, Folder 8.) (Back to text)

Unsigned, ‘Cuba: Background of POR’, The Internationalist, Vol. 4, No. 7, 1 April 1960, pp. 1, 8. (SP.); and Report on Discussions Held with Comrades from the Cuban Section of the Fourth International (I.S.), op cit. (Back to text)

E-mail letter from Adolfo Malvagni Gilly to Gary Tennant, North Carolina, 7 October 1996. For an outline of when and for how long these foreign envoys were in Cuba see Section 3 in Appendix F. (Back to text)

In contrast to my interpretation, Alexander cites an article written by Manuel Pellecer, a former leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party, which links the PSP’s attacks on Trotskyism at the Latin American Youth Congress to Fidel Castro’s denunciation of Trotskyism in a 26 July 1960 speech in Santiago de Cuba. See Alexander, RJ, (1973), op cit, p. 226. (Back to text)

These pamphlets included the Programa de Transición para la Revolución Cubana written by Alberto Sendic in May 1960, and another which reproduced Lenin’s ‘Suppressed Testament’ proposing that Stalin be removed from the post of General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party. This latter pamphlet also included an explanatory article by Trotsky together with the Fundamental Theses of Permanent Revolution. V. I. Lenin ‘Testamento Político’, Leon Trotsky El ‘Testamento de Lenin’, Tesis Fundamentales de la Revolución Permanente, Havana, Ediciones Voz Proletaria, nd. (Back to text)

PSP members were, of course, directed from inside and outside Cuba. It is significant that the seizure of the Trotskyists’ press also coincided with the presence in Cuba of Vittorio Vidali, the notorious Comintern agent who was responsible for the murder of numerous dissident communists and anarchists, particularly during the Spanish Civil War. See Unsigned, ‘Vittorio Vidali (né en 1900)’, Cahiers Léon Trotsky (Paris), No. 3, July-September 1979, pp. 175-176. Vidali arrived in Cuba on 27 April 1961 and left Havana for Prague on 6 June 1961. See Vidali, V, Diario di Cuba / Weiss, L, 1973: Ritorno a Cuba, Milan, Vangelista Editore, 1975. He was apparently in Cuba with Enrique Lister, advising the Cuban Stalinists who were in control of the G-2, the State Security services. Lister, another fabricated hero of the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War, was responsible implementing the order to forcibly dissolve the anarchist-dominated Defence Council and peasant collectives in Aragón. See Bolloten, B, The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power during the Civil War, Chapel Hill: NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1979, pp. 232-234. (Back to text)

’Aclaraciones: Sobre el Trotskismo’, Hoy, 16 June 1962, op cit. When these articles appeared in pamphlet form in Guantánamo the Trotskyists called on workers’ meetings to condemn the work and demand the removal from positions in the trade unions of those leaders who tried to distribute it. Unsigned, ‘Continuan los Calumniadores Stalinistas en Guantánamo’, Voz Proletaria (Havana), No. 16, First Fortnight, December 1962, p. 11. (BNJM: Colección Reserva, and SWP(US).) (Back to text)

A few days before the 26 July celebrations in Guantánamo, a PSP-led trade union and CDR distributed a leaflet which called on workers to attend a local 26 July meeting and strike a blow against the enemies of the Revolution. The Trotskyists were cited as one of these enemies. In response, the guantanameño branch of the POR(T) printed a leaflet which indicated that the Cuban Trotskyists gave unqualified and unconditional support to the Revolution. It was while distributing this leaflet that the railway worker-militant of the POR(T) was arrested, then held for two days before being removed from his trade union post. Report on Discussions Held with Comrades from the Cuban Section of the Fourth International (I.S.), op cit. (Back to text)

Although the POR(T) wanted to maintain an independent identity and discipline, when one of its members was selected for membership of the ORI on the largely apolitical basis that he or she was an exemplary worker, the comrade accepted the invitation. See Internal Information Bulletin of the International Secretariat’s National Leaderships, March 1963, pp. 4-5. (Back to text)

Lungarzo was not allowed to fly to a third country and only by sheer chance did he avoid arrest at the hands of the Argentinian security forces who were equally intent on imprisoning Leftists at that time. E-mail letter from Adolfo Malvagni Gilly to Gary Tennant, 4 April 1997, op cit. (Back to text)

["Nos veremos en las próximas trincheras."](My translation, GT.) Ibid, p. 2. In December 1964 when criticising the Soviet ‘Handbook of Marxism’ and addressing the issue of Trotsky’s thought, Guevara employed similar language. With specific reference to Trotsky in the same passage, he also argued that although Trotsky’s basic ideas were mistaken many things could derived from his thinking. See Kalfon, P, op cit, p. 406. (Back to text)

Certainly it was Roberto Acosta’s contention that that the pro-Moscow Stalinists used Guevara’s absence to obtain a cessation of all Trotskyist activities. Manuscript of the interview given by Roberto Acosta Hechavarría to Tano Nariño, op cit, p. 10. (Back to text)

Posadas, J, ‘Signification Historique de la Libération des Camarades Cubains’, Lutte Communiste (Paris), No. 33, May 1965, p. 8. (CERMTRI.); and Interview given by Idalberto Ferrera Acosta and Juan León Ferrera Ramírez to Gary Tennant, 16 August 1997, op cit; and Manuscript of the interview given by Roberto Acosta Hechavarría to Tano Nariño, op cit, p. 9. This version of events is also reported in outline form in the article Unsigned, ‘Cuban Trotskyists’, Spartacist, No. 5, November-December 1965, p. 4. (SP.) This Spartacist article was written on the basis of an interview given to its author by Ferrera. (Back to text)

Although the POR(T) was the first Cuban group openly to declare Cuba as the first Latin American Workers’ State (See Voz Proletaria (Havana), Year 2, No. 8, March 1961, p. 1. (HI: SWP Collection, Box No. 31, Folders 17-18.)), this was only after the January 1961 Sixth World Congress of the Fourth International (International Secretariat) had conferred this label on the Cuban state. (Back to text)

In contrast to Trotsky, in 1920-21 Lenin advocated trade union independence from the state. He argued that a system of appointing trade union officials from above would only train the bureaucrats and not the workers in solidarity and the technical and administrative aspects of production. See Lenin, VI, Collected Works, Vol. 32, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 19-107; and Service, R, Lenin: A Political Life, (Vol. 3, The Iron Ring), Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 162-166. (Back to text)

See ‘Manifiesto de la 2ª Conferencia del Partido Obrero Revolucionario Trotskista’, Voz Proletaria (Havana), No. 10, September 1962, pp. 2-3. (BNJM: Colección Reserva; and SWP(US).) This was also a central proposition of Gilly who, after being deported from Cuba, expressed the Posadists’ view in the increasingly pro-Chinese Monthly Review journal. Gilly, A, Monthly Review: Inside the Cuban Revolution, Vol. 16, No. 6, October 1964. Gilly’s argument that pressure from the masses would ultimately force the Revolutionary Leadership to side with the Chinese in the Sino-Soviet dispute (See ibid, pp. 32-33.) was refuted by events during the course of 1965-66. (Back to text)

See, for example, Political Bureau of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario Trotskista, ‘¡Huelga General e Insurrección Obrero-Campesino en Todos los Países Capitalistas! ¡Que el Ejército Soviético Aseste el Primer Golpe!’, Voz Proletaria Supplement (Havana), 23 October 1962. (SWP(US).) While this aspect of the Posadists’ programme is often taken in isolation to ridicule this now much reduced international tendency, it should be remembered that Mao as well as Guevara also believed that a nuclear war could be survived and lead to the victory of socialism. For an outline of Mao’s fulminations on this issue see Service, R, (1997), op cit, p. 354. (Back to text)

These ‘Workers’ State’ theories are succinctly summarised in a document drawn up by the French Lambertist group in December 1961. See The Trotskyist Movement and the Cuban Revolution, December 1961. (Unpublished English language version translated by John Archer.) (SP.) (Back to text)

Cited from The Militant in Gosse, V, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War and the Making of a New Left, London, Verso, 1993, p. 127. According to Peter Camejo, a leader of the SWP(US)’s Young Socialist Alliance in the early 1960s, in 1959 Hansen alone held a pro-Castro position in the party’s leadership. Ibid, p. 135 n66. (Back to text)

See Gosse, V, op cit, pp. 145-147 for an account of how the SWP(US) transformed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee through the intervention of Robert Taber, the CBS journalist who had sent filmed reports of Castro and the Rebel Army in the sierra back to the United States. The SWP(US)’s almost accidental intervention apparently took place with Fidel Castro’s personal blessing. (Back to text)

Robert McNeal has made this point, though argues that given the rise of the ‘New Left’ movement, to have taken a critical view of Castro and the Cuban Revolution would have been politically suicidal. McNeal, RH, ‘Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism’, In: Tucker, RC (ed.), op cit, p. 44. (Back to text)

In an apparent attempt to legitimise the SWP(US)’s perspective of entry into the Communist Party in Cuba, Joseph Hansen misrepresented the political affiliations of former members of the POR in the 1940s who had joined the M26J in the mid-1950s. Hansen misleadingly claimed that certain Cuban Trotskyists had been sympathetic to the International Committee of the Fourth International in the 1950s before being absorbed into the Fidelista movement and new Cuban Communist Party in the 1960s. See Hansen, J, ‘Trotskyism in Latin America—2’, Intercontinental Press (New York), Vol. 15, No. 32, 5 September 1977, p. 965. (SP.); and Letter from Joseph Hansen to Robert J. Alexander, New York, 24 December 1970. (RJA.) (Back to text)

New America, 22 September 1961. (RJA.) The Spartacist similarly argued that the SWP(US) “never protested about the jailings until after the Cuban government seemed to take the initiative by releasing the prisoners.” See ‘Cuban Trotskyists’, Spartacist, November-December 1965, op cit. (Back to text)

This is not to say that it was a linear process of ‘Sovietisation’. The arrest and trial of the pro-Moscow micro-faction in early 1968 was Fidel Castro’s last attempt to steer a vaguely independent course before the Soviet Union’s manipulation of oil imports to Cuba and the deepening preoccupations with domestic economic failings led to Castro’s effective capitulation in the early 1970s. (Back to text)

The MR-13 was a guerrilla movement in Guatemala which emerged from a nationalist military uprising on 13 November 1960. Initially based on a nationalist, anti-imperialist ideological orientation which limited the struggle to an anti-feudal democratic revolution, it formally adopted a socialist programme, declaring itself for the formation of a workers’ and peasants’ state at the end of 1963 when Latin American Posadists entered its ranks on a large scale. See, Gilly, A, ‘The Guerrilla Movement in Guatemala’, Monthly Review, May 1965, pp. 13-20. (Back to text)

While characterising the MR-13’s ‘direct-struggle-for-socialism’ guerrilla strategy as a struggle of a band of mercenaries in the service of Yankee imperialism, Castro praised the Moscow-supported Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes led by Luis Augosto Turcios Lima which itself had broken away from the MR-13 in February 1965. ‘Discurso de Fidel Castro en la Clausura de la Conferencia’, Cuba Socialista, February 1966, op cit, pp. 94-95. (Back to text)

See, for example, Posadas, J, ‘La Liquidation de Guevara: Un Coup a la Révolution Cubaine’, Lutte Communiste (Paris), No. 43, 10 November 1965, pp. 8, 7. (CERMTRI.) Even shortly after Guevara’s death in Bolivia was reported, the Posadists maintained that “Guevara was not killed in Bolivia. Guevara was killed in Cuba over two years ago, the result of a political dispute. He was engaged in a struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy, for effective support in Vietnam, against the bureaucratic elements in Cuba, against the ‘material incentive’ advocated by the Soviet bureaucrats and by those of the former CP machinery in Cuba.” (Translation by Emma and Philippe Jalabert.) Posadas, J, ‘Guevara N’Est Pas Mort en Bolivie’, Lutte Communiste (Paris), No. 69, 25 October 1967, pp. 2-3. (CERMTRI.) (Back to text)

In the late-1960s and early 70s, the Posadist Fourth International no longer sent comrades or the press of its various sections to its Cuban followers. Interview given by Idalberto Ferrera Acosta and Juan León Ferrera Ramírez to Gary Tennant, 16 August 1997, op cit. (Back to text)

Apart from the well-known case of the arrest and forced confession to cultural crimes by the Cuban writer Herberto Padilla, the early 1970s also saw the closure of Pensamiento Crítico, a heterogeneous ‘Guevarist-type’ magazine produced by the University of Havana’s Philosophy Department which had sprung up in the ‘counter-culture’ of the late 1960s. Some of the supporters of this Pensamiento Crítico group were initially sent to work-study camps to discuss their differences with more orthodox Communist Party members, before, in 1971, the magazine was closed down and a number of its leaders imprisoned. See the illuminating account of an interview with two leading members of the Pensamiento Crítico group in an internal report drawn up by a leading U.S. Trotskyist. Benjamin, A, Report on a Visit to Cuba (YSA Trip, Summer 1981), 19 June 1981. (Unpublished) Interestingly, rather like the Cuban Trotskyists, the Pensamiento Crítico supporters had faith in the independence, charisma and revolutionary capacity of Fidel Castro and thought that the Revolution could be reformed from within. (Back to text)

While even in the 1990s various suspected dissidents have been imprisoned or forced into exile on charges which incorrectly referred to them as Trotskyists (See, for example, G, Lopez, Report on Visit to Cuba, June 1991. (Unpublished)), officially sanctioned published attacks on Trotskyism have continued to appear intermittently. See, for example, the 18 June 1978 edition of the newspaper Granma. Lister, J, op cit, p. 116. This article appeared shortly before the death of Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, in October 1978 after a two year period of residence in Cuba. See, Mercader, L, and Sánchez, G, Ramón Mercader Mi Hermano, Madrid, Ed. Espasa-Calpe, 1990. (Back to text)